September 19, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com is rolling out two new applications that are designed to extend its application set from four to six, but will still keep the company rooted to its origins: CRM.The new Salesforce Content and Ideas applications, announced at the company’s Dreamforce user conference here Sept. 17, will grow the use of Salesforce.com’s applications from what might typically be the sales, support and marketing teams—and IT, as Salesforce creeps ever deeper into the platform market—to just about any department within an enterprise.

Salesforce Content, for example, provides a raft of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging, subscriptions, recommendations—that help users to manage unstructured data. Salesforce Ideas is a service that enables companies to build communities where participants can post and vote on ideas.Based on its own experience with IdeaExchange, a Web page on the Salesforce.com site that lets just about anyone post ideas for upgrades and rate other ideas—and where much of Salesforce.com’s development initiatives stem from—Ideas enables customers to build online communities where participants can submit, discuss and promote concepts around such issues as software development. Salesforce officials said in a statement that its own internal use of IdeaExchange has “changed the face of development,” with customers and partners shaping future product releases in live debates. To date, more than 5,000 ideas have been posted and “numerous” ideas have been incorporated into Salesforce applications.

June 5, 2007

There’s been a lot of speculation about Salesforce and Google lately. The two companies will soon announce a marketing and distribution alliance that will tightly bind Google Adwords to existing Salesforce tools that track sales from online advertising.

Salesforce and Google will be starting an extended partnership encompassing marketing and distribution of their products across 43 countries. It will begin with the integration of Google Adwords and Salesforce’s lead generation tools into a new application called “Group Edition”. Group edition replaces Salseforces earlier version Team edition.

Group Edition will enable Adwords users to track Adsense referrals to their site and build up a customer profile based on a the data a user enters into a site and their navigation path. Businesses will handle their Adwords campaigns through Google, as usual, but Salesforce takes over from there. When potential customers click through to the businesses site, Google tells Salesforce what search terms brought the user to the page and where they navigate throughout the site.

Seems Google is at it again…..this looks to be a smart buy for Ad syndication….

Google has continued its recent spending splurge with the purchase of FeedBurner, the Chicago-based distributor of news feeds to web browsers . Thought to be in the region of $100m (£50m), the deal offers the web giant a chance to extend its huge online ad network into the realm of RSS and off-site consumption of content.

May 21, 2007

…well it is certainly going that way according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. In a recent PWC report they state that the introduction of SOA and SaaS is radically reshaping the way that businesses pay for software, meaning that companies are now used to, and looking for, as shift from up front license payments to value-based subscription licensing.

From a vendor perspective however, this is not always good news. Vendors locked into up-front payments are finding it hard to move their business model,and many will either evolve or die trying….

May 13, 2007

Amazon S3’s paid for infrastrcure hosting model has been a huge success and now hosts five billion objects. S3 allows developers and startups to concentre on coding rather than figuring out where they want to host and how much rackspaces they want. A flexible and cheap pricing model makes the service a no-brainer.

The processing equivalent, EC2m is currently frozen to new users whilst Amazon adds additiona power.

March 26, 2007

Merrill Lynch have signed a 25,000 user deal with SaaS provider Salesforce.com. This is Salesforce.com’s largest deal to date and is a rather big endorsement of SaaS going mainstream with larger enterprise companies, especially as SaaS has always been associated with smaller businesses and firms.

March 20, 2007

Good Article on the Top 25 Web Startups in the UK. Rather than this being measured on fiscal metrics its based on the authors “companies to watch out for”. It’s an interesting read, and there are some interesting companies in the mix. You can find the out more here.

March 13, 2007

I don’t know about your business but communication costs are still a big part of ours. We deal with international clients and our the total sum of call costs amongst our business are high.

Internally we have done an assesment of the most useful way of keeping costs down and we have also evaluated technologies that allow us to do this.

Now everyone knows about VOIP and everyone knows about Skype. Skype is pretty useful if you are doing Skype to SKype calls or even SKype to phone calls from your desk. Currently however mobile Skype just does not cut it. It doesn’t work over GPRS, barely over 3G (if you can get a consistent decent signal) and Wi Fi hot spots are not always easy to find and still tend to be quite expensive.

What is needed is something simple and easy to use. What is needed is something like Jajah.

Jajah was founded by Daniel Mattes and Roman Scharf. It is a service based commercial model in which you register and purchase minutes, as well as registering handsets or moible phone numbers.

The basic premise of this is that you enter details (either using the web, a midlet on a phone, or using the integration with Outlook and Mac Addressbook) of the person you want to call and which handset of yours you want the call to come to. Jajah then calls you and calls the number you want, and tadah ! You are connected. Underneath the hood it is routing the call over the least expensive network infrastructure so that it can charge you the least amount of money for your call. We estimate that using it via a mobile could reduce our bills by more than a third. That is a fair amount of money spread over even 10 employees.

What I like about Jajah is that they don’t pretend not be a telephony company. They embrace it and work on using new technologies and providing the best value they can. They don’t insist on using VOIP for VOIP’s sake. They offer the least expensive way of attaining quality of service.

what is even more interesting is their business model. The system itself is built using Asterisk but they also have some propreitary IP for when it comes to routing calls, and for the actual voice algorithm. The first version prototype was built in two weeks. Version one was built in 92 days !

Off the back of this they have more than 1 million registered users and 82% of all visitors to their site try the service straight away – that is some success story.

March 10, 2007

Skype have borrowed a well known concept from the traditional telephony world and launched their own premium rate call service, but based on VOIP.

There is however an interesting twist. Skype users can take advantage of the service to set a rate which other callers then have to pay when dialling the number. The business model being that Skype keeps 30% of the revenue and the caller keeps 70% of the revenue.